Guises Page 8

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  THE BEGETTING

  “For thus saith the Lord God:

  …when I shall bring up the deep

  upon thee, and great waters shall

  cover thee…I will make thee a terror—”

  Ezekiel 26: 19-21

  The only thing the town of Tyre’s End, Florida was famous for was an enormous mass of decomposing tissue which washed ashore back in 1896. At first the boys who found it thought a great ship had been lost at sea and that this was the amputated mast. But when they were close enough to spy the silvery gangrene and smell the noxiousness of rotting fish, they understood better. A local naturalist then identified it as being nothing less than part of an octopod tentacle. It measured over one hundred feet long.

  It wasn’t as well known that Ponce de Leon had a nightmare while camped on this patch of coast in 1513, while seeking the fountain of youth. In this dream something was disturbing the ocean, waves rising up in frightening towers of black and red. The water churned as a beast larger than Gibraltar displaced the sea. And when de Leon looked down, he saw that the shining beach he stood on was the belly of a woman, shuddering, shuddering.

  It also wasn’t widely put about that this was where the Spaniards destroyed a settlement of French heretics, in order that they might take the area to build St. Augustine in 1565. Most historians believed that the mission—credited as being the oldest permanent white settlement in the United States—was erected on the same spot as the heathen hamlet the Catholic friars knew loathingly as Fin du Tyre. Rites had been rumored to be performed by this paganisme which were so disgusting that the Spaniards felt justified in wiping them out to every man, woman and child as they had the Aztecs at their bloody altars.

  There was a small fragment, a descriptive passage written by one Don Alejandro Salamanca, contested by all modern historians and church officials for the absurdity of its content. It stated that Don Salamanca’s advance party of reconnoiterers had come upon the French colonists during the practice of a vile rite upon the beach.

  Bajamar, at low tide, all the females—regardless of either advanced or tender age—lay in rows with their naked backs pressed into the sand. The men danced, a sort of sarabande, weaving in and out between these rows. They seemed to be one long appendage as we spied them from the forest’s perimeter, as if such a member had come apart from a sea monster of ponderous size. One of the men stood between the ankles of a woman, apparently moving down the lines of them. To his hips by some magical means we could never reckon was strapped a length of gray tentacle, as from one of those leviathans which drags ships down to doom—yet smaller. Some of the soldiers swore that it was his own profano gusano, a profane worm such as Satan himself might possess. But I did not believe it then and cannot now. The flesh of it was not as a man’s flesh but was a scabious armor, as of some diseased maritime mail. And even if a man might possess such a thing and it be polluted with a plague to corrupt the surface of it so, it could never move the way this thing did. I saw it move between his legs as he stood without bending, longer than his legs, and of a demonic volition into each bruja’s womb. Even the most withered crones and girls too young to bleed submitted and writhed in apparent ecstasy. The ocean began to churn until we prayed, certain that this was el final de el mundo, de Dios, de el todo. The end of the world, of God, of everything.

  The area—even after exorcism—was so psychically tainted that the mission had to be built a few miles down the coast anyway.

  It was never written that a few escaped into the swamps. They returned only after the Spanish priests decreed the place Tiero del Espanto and forbade anyone on pain of excommunication from venturing there.

  Nicole knew all of this, however, for she had lived in Tyre’s End all her life. She was of an ancestry claiming only the purest French heredity, not like three quarters of the population who were mixed over the centuries with runaway slaves, Indian cannibals, and degenerate English Enochites (followers of a strange sect based on the teachings of John Dee). This ripe single quarter of truebloods maintained some distance from the rest, becoming in time a clique devoted to wealth and hedonism. If there had ever really been any heavy-handed sorcery in the past, it was now only of a decorative nature, a backdrop and excuse for orgiastic scenarios. Indeed the exclusivity of money had disappeared at least sixty years before when an infamous sideshow deva named Cyanea Chaldes retired from the circuit and built a mansion just outside of town.

  The Chaldes bitch and her mutated cronies were even more clannish than the descendants of the original Fin du Tyre. Strange that a carnival could have made enough to afford such affluence or to allow a group of prodigies to put on airs. Even after Cyanea died and left the earnings from her estate to her son, no one from the town ever got to see the inside of that house. Until now.

  Nicole considered how she’d received the invitation to visit the mansion.

  It had come in a lullaby intuited during the last hurricane as the force five winds smashed the curve of the coast. It had come after the shrieking gale passed inland and the rains ceased to lash Tyre’s End—already beaten into submission. Nicole had crawled from shelter to walk the stricken beach. It was there she’d found the black shell. As rescue squads nosed abroad to count drowned corpses, she’d held this grotesquely twisted shell up to her ear and listened. Hearing—a whisper in the cosmic roar within…

  Nicole had also found a basalt bowl washed up on the sand that night. The clouds at last blown toward the jungles in the state’s interior, a queerly bent moon had risen and now its light fell into the saltwater filling this bowl. Nicole spelled the invitation out in runes, bidding her come see Mr. Chaldes, the son of Cyanea, a mystic recluse in his own right, reputed to be crippled but rich.

  He was an amateur marine biologist, collecting specimens of (yes, freakish) oceanic trifles from all across the planet. As a very young man, he’d also published several books in the sixties and early seventies, purported to be translations of ‘forbidden’ tomes mentioned only in horror stories. Indeed no one in the realistic world took them to be anything but convenient devices for literary mythology. But he’d certainly had his following for a time. Fans came the world over, not to have any better luck than the townfolk in getting so much as a glimpse of Mr. Chaldes.

  Why, Nicole had never seen him before either. She’d only seen the enormous house, perched atilt on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. A weird place, that. Not a fully straight wall visible. (But, then, why would a woman like Cyanea—accustomed to twisted limbs and humpbacks—have designed a structure with traditional geometry?) It was black with something akin to barnacles clinging to the plaster, gleaming after the hurricane had seemed to bathe it in oil.

  Of course, she went. Perhaps a truly cautious and law-abiding woman wouldn’t have but Nicole had never been either. Adventures weren’t found in the sconces of discretion nor was wealth acquired with modesty. She had stripes from delightful whips and bundles of teeth marks in publically hidden recesses to prove her recklessness and broad mind.

  Such omens as these summonings surely harkened to great possibilities. They weren’t offered thus to anyone. One had to be special to receive such occult solicitation. Nicole knew she was very special.

  She had a gift which made her services spectacular. Men who came into her tight womb or supple rectum or generous mouth found their orgasms increased manifold through the pores of their skin. Beads of perspiration burst like identical spurts of the jizzum that simultaneously erupted from their organs; blood dotted from equally volcanic capillaries. They would collapse in the most profound ecstasy across her when finished, covered in sweat and blood, swearing that this, by the gods, had been the most intensely satisfying experience they’d ever had.

  This rich recluse—this cripple—must be much in need of such a talented woman. Mr. Chaldes heard of her and the rumors that she was some sort of a goddess. And he’d used an apparent fluency in magic to issue a petition she must find irresistible.
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br />   Nicole walked up the steep hill to the mansion, imagining what sort of price would be laid at her altar. Diamond bracelets and sapphire pendants, platinum rings, an offer of marriage with groin love undying. Yes, it was possible to overlook any mere physical imperfection if the man was wealthy enough. It was her chance to bring opulence back to the right part of Tyre’s End.

  Nicole had been wed just once before, to a gentleman who unfortunately died on the bridal night when her total body rapture caused him to suffer an aneurysm. Since they had been married less than six hours, his relatives managed to cheat her out of a widow’s due in the courts. Ah, but two of them—the late groom’s brother and a cousin—had both been curious enough about Nicole to be enticed into her bed. There she’d driven both to madness with the extremity of the coital response. There was no way for the rest of the family to accuse her of criminality. No doctor could prove she’d fucked them into raving lunacy.

  Nicole felt the last traces of the wind coming in from the sea, blowing through her hair sharply. There was a stench in it, sour, of dead fish and spoiled meat. She inhaled, curiously aroused by it. She stared at the crenelated runnels and bumps of black on the outside of the mansion, thinking that a trick of the moonlight made it appear to crawl. She used the massive knocker on the door—in the shape of a rather menacing octopus—and rapped loudly.

  The door opened three inches of crack and a wrinkled head regarded her.

  “Tell your employer that the Aphrodite he invited has arrived. His invitation came to me via the sea and the storm, as any call to Venus should.”

  The mute servant let her in and ushered her into the parlor. His shoulder boasted a lump his collar only barely hid. Nicole could plainly see a second head, smaller than the one that blinked at her in silent welcome. The second face squinted and drooled, the expression that of a congenital idiot. The servant was so old that she wondered if he must have been in the freak tent with Cyanea. He gestured for her to wait.

  Nicole checked her makeup in a mirror, running her fingers through her tangled hair to comb it. She studied a collection of clammy fossils. Some were a cross between spoiled cottage cheese and thin-shelled oysters only partially petrified. Others were nautilus-chambered tumors of surreal beauty melting like clocks on Dali landscapes. She wondered what these said about the nature of time or of malignancies. Maybe they said that carcinogens in lumps were the genius of Mr. Chaldes’ artistry. She pushed the deformed nodules around his display case, nudging them with her finger. She imagined she heard screams in their squelch and pulled her finger away to wipe it on her dress. She sniffed. The scent was of woman’s cunt emollient and man’s bile. And of rotted air bladders on Sargasso stalks, days after lightning strikes the sea.

  Up on the sloping mantle was a photograph of Mr. Chaldes’ notorious mother. Nicole recognized it from rumors she’d heard while spread-eagled across velvet wheels during profligate dinner parties in town. Legend in the venal circle of French truebloods Nicole traveled in had it that Cyanea had been a contortionist who showed her son how deviance and birth mixed. She’d taught him how universes could squeeze out all manner of dark horizons once their own boundaries had been warped. And in what circus had Cyanea been freak queen, in what carnival of skewed reality?

  Not that anybody really knew but they loved to speculate. And hearing them gossip about the legendary wickedness of the Chaldes Lilith had brought a burning to Nicole’s genitals not unlike the classic piquing by Spanish fly. Thinking about it now, while waiting for her new client/master to arrive, renewed this voluptual itching so that Nicole’s hands began to flutter down to her crotch.

  Then she heard a whisper from the doorway.

  “Misshapen me…”

  She turned to see him in the shadow of a massive old grandfather clock, both pendulums swinging in an offset rhythm of angled time. His legs, his arms, even the two canes he used to hold himself up with rippled as if being perceived through sheets of hurricane water.

  “I will fuck a seed into you which will alter every law of sex and conception…” he said—or didn’t. Was that mouth moving? And was it even a mouth? It bore an uncanny resemblance to the puckered crease in the face in the photo on the mantle. “The antichrist can only generate from the rape of matter by anti-matter where the rules of biology detonate into chaos by an infusion of devolutionary jizzum. The messiah can only find its way out of a womb mutated into a wilderness.”

  He clomped forward, supported by the canes, hairless head slick as the outside walls of the house. Had he been burned to be so black? To appear to have such a loose skin?

  Grafts, Nicole thought. Or flesh from a lightless place. Never was there a man more crippled and more in need of a…goddess. She stepped toward him, unbuttoning her dress, hearing his hollow voice in her head.

  “Only a freak can save this world.”

  Mr. Chaldes handed her—a razor or a wand—and bade her carve patterns of carnal protozoa in a perverse cartouche upon his wicked pillar.

  “Every messiah must have his scripture,” he told her. In whatever manner he told her.

  Peering closely without being so rude as to stare, Nicole still tried to catch his lips moving. Yet they appeared to be as 1 frozen as some of the fossils he had on display. Perhaps he threw his voice, another trick he’d learned from his mother’s carny days.

  He’d entered the room naked and she knelt before his gross erection. She wasn’t necessarily put off by either its size or the unusual condition of its surface. Diseased skin was nothing new to her. Nicole had straddled torsos riddled with skin cancers and had licked the testicles of syphilitics with metastatic lesions. She’d never caught anything, had never been sick a single day—or night—in her life. She obliged, following the designs Mr. Chaldes showed her in a book—one of those he’d published himself perhaps.

  She tried not to let the movement of the tic-thwockckckckck of the pendulum in the gargantuan clock unnerve her as she carefully sliced, matching as it did the throbbing in his ropy penis. It was not the first time a man had requested that she either tattoo or mutilate his flesh in some way. She’d always prided herself at her finesse in the art of macabre body adornment.

  And when he was gross enough with blood and after a noxious spume of pale ink had squirted what felt like locusts into Nicole’s face, the deep sleep bit.

  Night terrors skimmed the surface like toxic eels leaving Nicole’s mind fit for pickling, the bed a jar and the darkness a cold vinegar. His was the slurp of formaldehyde exchanged in the midnight kiss, groins fused until lovers resembled some blasphemous trematodal Chang and Eng. She understood she’d been drugged as Mr. Chaldes metamorphosed into a meat-sucker, tunnel nostrils enlarged to accommodate the chunks some grinder must have missed. (But what was it he was consuming? Some sludge Nicole was lying in, brought in on heaped platters by the double-headed servant. It looked as if it had been scraped from the outside walls of the house. It shimmered, oozing, oddly animated as it was rubbed against her clitoris by the servant. She thought she heard the second, moronic head that lolled upon the servant’s shoulder chortling, a loose phlegmatic noise that must be what lust sounded like in a leper whose sinuses were rotted out. The servant roughly slumped her, backward, across Mr. Chaldes’ wriggling crutches. But her spine didn’t break; she was a supple goddess. In this or any incarnation she could have been a professional contortionist, like the hideous female in the picture on the mantle.

  Nicole could see now the long painted portrait on the opposite wall. At first glance the image of Cyanea seemed to be draped in a gossamer silvery-pink gauze, yards of it bunched in a train behind her. Upon closer inspection, she was clearly wrapped in a huge lion’s mane jellyfish. Old-fashioned oil lamps flanking the portrait made the mass appear to pulsate around the carny queen.

  (But surely that was an effect of whatever he’d drugged Nicole with. She’d experimented with enough chemicals to recognize the flutter of hallucination. Sometimes it was the only way to gag down some of
the sewage she was expected to swallow.)

  The deformed recluse stuck out his fist, the skin softened with blisters. With it he spread wide the shores of her heaven, and Nicole was at once grateful for whatever opiate slipped her. The dirt under his nails embedded in the walls of her womb, germinating something of worlds, sulfuric with a life only a mother could love.

  Had it not been for the drug she might actually have shuddered, a reaction of disgust she’d always managed to hold back before. And it clearly wouldn’t do to shiver here, not now, not with who knew how much at stake. She’d joined with all manner of humans and animals but had never before experienced any sensation so squalid and cold. For even the most feral, most polluted loins could be warmed, containing an inner heat which could be milked for its living burn. But not him, not this.

  Nicole didn’t remember lying down—or being bent impossibly and compromisingly. She didn’t willingly spread her legs for that, did she? Even a goddess of profane love must have standards, commandments. A set of rules of the ritual—no matter how flexibly perverse they may be.

  Had her nipples erected with a passion borne of sick fever (making her the only creature of heat present) or had they shriveled outright with horror? Had her clitoris withered like a termite on a matchhead? Did she lean back against the wall all of quivering tarry angles, hearing the baying of gilled, cleft-palated hounds as she whimpered her own smothered orgasms?

  Nicole could never have been seduced by this gross mollusk man, this muttering tentaculata whose bloated glaciated cock beat unnatural time with that clock. Tic-thwockckckckck, tic-thwockckckckck, ckckckckckckckckckckckckckckckckckckckckckck. Resounding like a torpedo rushing leagues under very deep water, taking time sideways with it.